Artists

Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world."
(Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against Nature, Against Life)

Who am I?

"When I discover who I am, I'll be free."
(Ralph Ellison)

women in my life

"I think most men carry around a secret library full of films they've shot of every woman they ever met. Crude little sequences strung together that help us imagine what life might be like with a particular person - buying a car, going to Disneyland, standing around in Sears while she checks the price on bath towels. Despite popular belief, guys don't mentally undress every woman they meet; they simply thread them up and run them through the imaginary film projector in their heads to see what comes of it."
(Neil LaBute, from "Look at Her" in Seconds of Pleasure)

feeling memories

"To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost."
(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)

style and substance

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
Sam Brown, Washington Post, 1977

silence

Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer.
Muhammad Ali

what can u be

If they can make penicillin out of mouldy bread, they can sure make something out of you. Muhammad Ali

what can u be

If they can make penicillin out of mouldy bread, they can sure make something out of you. Muhammad Ali

champions

Champions aren't made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them-a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill. Muhammad Ali

Originality

What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not see before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea-an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before. To be the first--that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else--these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. Lifetimes of ecstasy crowded into a single moment.
Mark Twain- The Innocents Abroad

Memory

...little threads that hold life's patches of meaning together.
Mark Twain- Morals and Memory speech

Marriage

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain- Notebook, 1894

Friendship

People talk about beautiful friendships between two persons of the same sex. What is the best of that sort, as compared with the friendship of man and wife, where the best impulses and highest ideals of both are the same. There is no place for comparison between the two friendships; the one is earthly, the other divine.
Mark Twain- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Dignity

DIGNITY
...what sorry shows and shadows we are. Without our clothes and our pedestals we are poor things and much of a size; our dignities are not real, our pomps are shams. At our best and stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.
Mark Twain- "The Memorable Assassination"

pregnancy

Pregnant women! They had that weird frisson, an aura of magic that combined awkwardly with an earthy sense of duty. Mundane, because they were nothing unique on the suburban streets; ethereal because their attention was ever somewhere else. Whatever you said was trivial. And they had that preciousness which they imposed wherever they went, compelling attention, constantly reminding you that they carried the future inside, its contours already drawn, but veiled, private, an inner secret.

Ruth Morgan

marriage

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate
W.H.Auden

Marriage

Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal.
Louis K Anspacher

man and woman

The friendship between a man and a woman which does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life long experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in lifelong friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to wed, to make such a three cornered comradeship a permanent success.
Anna Garlin Spencer

clouds

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky.
-- Rabindranath Tagor

aliens exist

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
-- Calvin